When encountering the term discourse, the most common and easy association, is related to the linguistic aspect. When we are having a discourse it means we are engaging in a conversation and following its rules. But there is also another kind of discourse, which is the one we are here interested in. That is the discourse understood in the field of cultural studies.

As Rose (2001) writes, the employment of the term discourse in the cultural studies’ field started to appear in the work of the French theorist Michele Focault. His main concern was to explore in which ways values and identities are contained in daily practises and rules. According to Focault indeed, “human subjects are produced and not simply born”, and their subjectivity is constructed (Rose, 2001). And how is it constructed? Through discourses. Rose states that “discourse is a particular knowledge about the world which shapes how the world is understood and how things are done in it” (p. 136). Discourse is strictly related to identity since it crates subjects. As for example, the medical discourse crates identities of ill and healthy, patient and doctor, and so on. That is why discourse (as we intend it) is said to be very powerful in the sense that it is productive (Rose, 2001). It doesn’t only produces subjects and identities but discourses also claim to be absolutely true, and that is how some of them become dominant above others. In general then, discourse analysis can be defined as a method, or a theoretical framework, which is interested in how the socially constructed concept and objects that surround us, came into shape.

Among discourse analysis, it is possible to recognise two kinds of it: discourse analysis I and discourse analysis II. The first one focuses on the textual analysis (text, intertextuality and context) of visual images and texts, while the second one is concerned with the analysis of practises that those texts allow. The one which will receive most of the attention here, is discourse analysis I. Discourse analysis I tends to be more concerned with topics of discourse, discourse formation and productivity rather than with the topics of regimes of truth, power and institutions (Rose, 2001), and it is therefore more closely relatable to semiotics. The main question discourse analysis asks is then: how do “images construct the accounts of the social world” ? (Rose) and how are they constructed as true or natural through regimes of truth.

To conduct a discourse analysis (I), it is first necessary to gather some sources (texts, images, etc.). In order to understand those sources, it is important to have a firm knowledge regarding the historical context as well as what Panofsky calls a ‘synthetic intuition’ which is common sense (Rose, p. 147). In analysing them, is then useful to search for recurring themes and recognise the differences; intertexuality is therefore a strong interpretative power. Discourse analysis I would for example allow to investigate how social differences are constructed in society through an analysis of images circulating, texts, books, signs and so on and the recognition of some “key themes” (Rose, p. 151). An absence, or invisibility, of images can also be productive and telling and therefore to be kept int account. The context of a discourse is fundamental to the analysis since it includes the institutional location as well as the audience. The effect of such analysis is to “erase the institutonal context in which a discourse analysis is produced” (Rose, p. 161).

Charlene Elliott (2001), makes use of discourse analysis to examine Starbucks’ marketing and branding of the products. Elliott starts her analysis with the assumption that all cultures adapt the imported goods (such as coffee beans) to the local context and discourse (p. 370). By doing so, the meaning of coffee for example is renegotiated. To investigate how Starbucks renegotiated such meaning, it is necessary to gather some sources in which meaning can be found. Those are both the text itself (ex. the coffee) and the discourse surrounding it (ex. the coffee place, the packaging), which end up being ‘consumed’.

Elliott points out how the discourse around coffee has been changed by Starbucks and how a foreign good has been adapted to Western consumption. Unveiling the exotic origin of the beans, has for example been a first recent step in that direction. Beans and blends are given names of far away places such as Kenya, Guatemale and Ethiopia so that they evocate something. By buying a coffee which beans come from an exotic location, the consumer is symbolically consuming the place as well as the coffee (Elliott, p. 374). But was is actually being consumed is not Colombia, but the Western idea of Colombia. This aspects intails therefore a discourse of power relations and in a way of claimed Western superiority. Other than the names given to the beans, Elliott also takes into account the names given to the coffee sizes: short, grande and venti, which supposely refer to some link with Italian coffee. Starbacks therefore, Elliott claims, “offers a packaged and refeshioned global woven through a local representation” (p. 379). The use of ‘places’ that Starbucks does through naming and unveiling origins id defined by Elliott as merely sematic, it is only a style. Starbucks then “draws from a global context to create an image appealing to local consumption (Elliott, p. 380).